Page 59 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

what he saw. He said he didn’t see anything, but again he was shaken and nervous.
Dranov is a physician. He has a duty to report any child abuse he becomes aware of. Second
question: So why doesn’t Dranov go to the authorities when he hears McQueary’s story? He was
asked about this during the trial.
Defense: Now, you specifically pressed him that night and you wanted to know what specifically
he had seen, but my understanding is he did not tell you what he had seen. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
D: All right. He told—but you left that meeting with the impression that he heard sexual sounds.
Correct?
Dranov: What he interpreted as sexual sounds.
What he interpreted as sexual sounds.
D: And your—your plan that you presented to him or proposed to him was that he should tell his
boss, Joe Paterno. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
D: You did not tell him to report to Children and Youth Services. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
Q: You did not tell him that he should report to the police. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
D: You did not tell him that he should report to campus security. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct…
D: You did not think it was appropriate for you to report it based on hearsay. Correct?

Dranov: That’s correct.
D: And indeed, the reason that you did not tell Mike McQueary to report to Children and Youth
Services or the police is because you did not think that what Mike McQueary reported to you
was inappropriate enough for that sort of report. Correct?
Dranov: That’s correct.
Dranov listens to McQueary’s story, in person, on the night it happened, and he isn’t convinced.
Things get even more complicated. McQueary originally said he saw Sandusky in the showers on
Friday, March 1, 2002. It was spring break. He remembered the campus being deserted, and said
that he went to see Paterno the following day—Saturday, March 2. But when investigators went
back through university emails, they discovered that McQueary was confused. The date of his
meeting with Paterno was actually a year earlier—Saturday, February 10, 2001—which would
suggest the shower incident happened the evening before: Friday, February 9.
But this doesn’t make sense. McQueary remembers the campus as being deserted the night he
saw Sandusky in the showers. But on that Friday evening in February, the Penn State campus was
anything but deserted. Penn State’s hockey team was playing West Virginia at the Greenberg
Pavilion next door, in a game that started at 9:15 p.m. There would have been crowds of people on
the sidewalk, filing into the arena. And a five-minute walk away, at the Bryce Jordan Center, the
popular Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies was playing. On that particular evening, that corner
of the Penn State campus was a madhouse.
John Ziegler, a journalist who has written extensively about the Penn State controversy, argues
that the only plausible Friday night in that immediate time frame when the campus would have been
deserted is Friday, December 29, 2000—during Christmas break. If Ziegler is right—and his
arguments are persuasive—that leads to a third question: If McQueary witnessed a rape, why would
he wait as long as five weeks—from the end of December to the beginning of February—to tell
anyone in the university administration about it? 6

The prosecution in the Sandusky case pretended that these uncertainties and ambiguities didn’t
exist. They told the public that everything was open-and-shut. The devastating 23-page indictment